


New Disaster

by superfluouskeys



Category: Portal (Video Game)
Genre: Chell-centric, F/F, Minor Original Character(s), Personal Growth, Pining, Post-Canon, Post-Portal 2, it prob won't surprise you that GLaDOS' speech pattern appeals to me A Lot lol
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-26
Updated: 2019-02-26
Packaged: 2019-11-05 22:41:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 9,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17927744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/superfluouskeys/pseuds/superfluouskeys
Summary: There is no going back, no matter how much she thinks she'd like to.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Oh, hi.  
> I'm sure if you know anything about the Portal games and also me as a person, you are utterly unsurprised to see me here.  
> This is essentially a one-shot that leaves room for potential continuation.  
> I've been writing it nonstop for like three days so I feel insane.  
> I'll never be over these games thanks for asking!!!

For awhile, she walks.

Chell never liked being outdoors before, she remembers now, like a vague echo of something that doesn’t seem like it should be true.  The sun hurts and the grass itches and the wind chafes, but still she dreamed of seeing the sky again, sure that the fresh air and the warmth of the sun and the promise of a future would be everything she feared she’d lost forever.

It hurts to realize that she still doesn’t like to be outside, even after all she’s been through to get here.  A dream, ruined by the reality.

How long did she dream?

When she tires of walking, she sits.

Mercifully, she’s too tired to think very much.  Even trying to go over what happened makes her feel dizzy to the point of nausea.  And she’s not sure she ever wants to do another puzzle for as long as she lives. 

Dad liked to do crosswords early in the morning before he left for work.  Chell didn’t have to go to school until later, but she got up early to watch him do the crosswords.  She wanted to learn, but general knowledge, he told her, the clues and the things they drew upon to be understood and puzzled through, came from lived experience.

The grass around her is dry and prickly.  There are bugs.  She’d almost forgotten about bugs.  She slaps one off her right wrist and feels surprised by the ache there.  She frowns, then remembers.  It feels like it shouldn’t have been real, like the whole thing was just another part of an endless stream of disturbing nightmares.

She rubs her wrist and tries to wrap her mind around it.

How long since she’s been outside?

What did GLaDOS say, before?  _The world has changed since you’ve been outside, I’m the only thing standing between—_

Lies, meant to scare her into backing down.  Better to be here than dead.

How long ago was that?

Fifty days, she remembers, and then?

 _Nine, nine, nine, nine, nine_ , and Wheatley said…

Words have never come easily to Chell, something her father never understood—something most people never understood—but when she woke up, they felt somehow even further from her tongue.

She reached, because it felt important, but the words wouldn’t come.  She’s long since learned not to care if people think she’s stupid, but this was different.  If someone who holds the key to your cage thinks you’re stupid, then he might decide you’re not worth saving.

In the present, she hums experimentally.  Her voice is hoarse from lack of use, and she has nothing to put voice to except the fractured remnants of a melody and some words she only half-understands.

This, far more than anything else, feels real.  Chell is not musical, can barely carry a tune, and certainly could not create a new one.  This is the song GLaDOS sent along with her.

It tugs on a heartstring, sharp and painful like an old wound, and Chell wants, suddenly and violently, to turn back.  She never liked being outside, and they got along all right in the end, didn’t they?  Surely she doesn’t have to charge forth aimlessly into this open field, vast and endless and sunny and itchy and unfamiliar, in search of some paltry way to spend the rest of her days?  Surely this isn’t the way her story—their story ends, after all that?

GLaDOS probably likes crosswords.  If dad’s affinity for them were in Chell’s file, GLaDOS would have found a way to fashion a crossword that could kill you if you got it wrong.

It’s a weird thing to smile about, but Chell is glad to learn she’s still capable.

She stands.  She keeps walking.

* * *

It turns out GLaDOS wasn’t lying about the state of the world.  Chell has only vague memories left of the town where she grew up, all twisted and discoloured over time with varying shades of nostalgia, but a part of Chell had really expected it to be more or less the same as it was before.  You don’t expect the only real place you’ve ever known to be a shell of itself.

There are people, though, and life does go on, and words have never come easily to Chell, but people expect words, and so she manages the bare minimum to get herself what she needs to survive.

This, she remembers perfectly.  Surviving.

The town is riddled with abandoned shambles of houses.  She thinks she finds the one where she grew up, but really it’s hard to tell one dilapidated structure from the next.  She finds some canned food in the pantry and eats solid food for the first time since she was put into stasis.  It tastes like dirt and hurts her stomach.  She sleeps, a natural, unmedicated sleep, and it’s terrible and restless and riddled with nightmares and the echo of a song she can’t shake with words she only half-understands.

She finds some clothes that fit her well enough and she changes into them, and this is the first thing about the world outside of Aperture that feels remotely good or worthwhile.

She works, scrubbing floors and toilets and busted-up kitchen appliances in what seems to be the only remaining restaurant in town.  So she gets food, and some money, and the people she works for don’t care that she doesn’t talk much.  In fact, they prefer it. 

People have always been like that, looking down on her because she doesn’t mind manual labour, because she vastly prefers scrubbing toilets to making nice with people.

Dad told her she’d have to learn to make nice with people.  He told her that everyone, from her teachers to her classmates to near-strangers they met only once, found her silence deeply unsettling.  He tried to make her practice, things like saying, _hello, how are you, I’m fine, what have you been up to_ , things people expected, he told her.

She went along with it, because she didn’t want people to find her deeply unsettling, but as it turned out, she didn’t understand what he wanted from her at all, because just when she thought she was getting the hang of it, he would flip the script, say something like, _I’m not doing so well today, because of something that happened at work_.  _I’m fine, what have you been up to?_ she would say, and he turned dark and silent, himself, and stormed out of the room.

 Once, he slammed his fist down on the table and before he left, he said, _Christ, it’s like talking to that damned computer at the Center!_

Chell hasn’t thought about that in a long time.  The memory returns to her as she’s bearing down on a particularly nasty spill underneath one of the tables, one that’s no doubt been there since the morning.  She wonders if he meant GLaDOS, or some earlier version of her, and her fist clenches more tightly around her sponge, and again she feels that sick, stabbing desire to return.

She scrubs harder, and distracts herself by imagining a less sophisticated GLaDOS being taught basic human civility.  She wonders if a person taught her to say, _oh, hi, how have you been?  I’ve been really busy…_

She wonders if it’s only because the scientists put an actual human into her consciousness that GLaDOS is the way she is, or if her sentience is something more than the sum of her parts.  She wonders if it was the memory of Caroline that caused GLaDOS to save Chell in the end, or if it was something else.  She wonders how an AI crafted by glorified murderers could really be expected to know any other way, and she considers what a feat it is for a human to grow up to be something other than the sum of her parts, let alone a robot.

On the walk home, she wonders if GLaDOS knows that Chell never really hated her or wanted her dead, certainly not after she understood the full extent of what GLaDOS was.

She’s beyond exhausted, but she can’t get to sleep.  Somewhere in the back of her mind there’s this melody that won’t leave her alone, and she can’t stop thinking about how she wishes she could explain that it’s not that she wanted GLaDOS dead, not really, not even a little in the end, just that she wanted to live, that she wanted to leave, because she wanted to return to—

Because she wanted to return to something long lost to her, long before she was put into stasis, or even before Dad died.

Maybe something she never had at all.

* * *

It occurs to Chell that maybe she would enjoy her freedom more if she did something meaningful with her time, instead of just cleaning up other people’s messes and moping about murderous robots.  There’s considerable demand for labour to help revitalize the land after whatever disaster befell it, particularly those who don’t mind a non-zero chance of exposure to radiation.

Chell reasons that she’s doubtless been exposed to worse.

As to the nature of the disaster that led to the state of things, Chell has yet to receive an answer, and it’s not in her nature to pry.  Even scouring what remains of the library proves next to useless—much of its contents were destroyed, and what remains from the last hundred years or so reads like Aperture propaganda.

There is a map, though, of the town and the surrounding area, framed in one of those big glass cases, with the Aperture Science Enrichment Center marked a few miles to the west.  Chell traces a meandering line with her finger from where she’s standing in the library to her childhood home and through the field to Aperture.

She remembers something, suddenly: staring out the window of Dad’s car at the open field with the tall, dry grass, cradling the stupid potato battery she didn’t want to make on the way to Take Your Daughter to Work Day.

In the present, she blinks and staggers backward.  She sits down and steadies herself.

She was sullen the whole morning, she remembers.  Dad was nervous, and it was manifesting as anger at her.  She wasn’t making it easy.

 _I already did a potato battery_ , she said coldly, for what must have been the dozenth time.

 _We can’t always do what we want, Chell,_ he snapped, knuckles white on the steering wheel.

_But I already did one._

_God damn it, Chell!  Why can’t you just act normal for one day?  Talk to the other kids, enjoy the other shit they’ll put out for you, it’s not all about the god-damned potatoes!_

Chell crossed her arms and stared out the window for the rest of the ride, determined to hide the hot tears pooling at the corners of her eyes.

 _Not talking again, huh?_   Dad sighed heavily.  _Great.  Just fucking great._

Chell slammed her project together on one of the display tables and stood sullenly next to it for as long as she cound stand it.  People tried to talk to her, some of the other kids and some of the Aperture employees, always in the sickly-sweet manner of people who think they’re very good with difficult children.

Eventually everyone lost interest in Chell, and she wandered out of the room to find something more interesting to glare at.

She remembers voices with something slimy in the tone, almost laughing when there was nothing funny going on.

 _Well, at least she’s stopped trying to kill us_ , one man said.

The other chuckled, a wet and ugly sound.  _Those poor cats, though!_

_Well, you know what they—oh!  What are you doing here, little girl?_

Chell shrugged.  _I got bored with the potatoes,_ she said.

The two men laughed, and it twisted up their horrible faces, and they said something about _those damn potato batteries every goddamn year, but this kid is too goddamn smart for that bullshit!_

And then they showed her, and this Chell is just starting to remember, all blurry around the edges, and the sound is like voices underwater—but they showed her what they were looking at through their big observation window, some kind of massive robot hanging limp from the ceiling.

There’s a sound that goes with the memory, she thinks now, beyond the men and their cruel laughter and whatever they told her about what GLaDOS was or how she had come to be.

She doesn’t remember what she said.  Maybe just, _can you turn it on?_   She remembers pressing her hands up against the glass, fascinated, amazed that a day she was sure would be terrible could hold such a wonder as a robot that knew what it was.

The men laughed, talked to each other about it, maybe said something about safety regulations, but then one of them said, _oh, what’s the worst that could happen?_   And he turned on her power.

The massive robot body _twitched_.  Convulsed, maybe.  Then it swiveled abruptly and lifted its head to shine a bright yellow light on them, like it was looking right at them.

Chell pressed her face against the window, enraptured.

 _Oh, hi,_ said the robot.  Its head moved when it talked, and the optic flashed and shifted.  It seemed so _alive_. 

_You know, I was thinking--during my last spell of being alive, that is--that if you turned somebody else off and on at your whim, they might begin to experience bitterness and resentment.  Just something I was thinking about._

_Oh, be nice_ , said one of the men, still with that sickening amusement in his voice.  _It’s Take Your Daughter to Work Day, and this little girl thinks you’re the coolest thing since potato batteries._

 _Take Your Daughter to_ — said the robot, and then its voice changed drastically, and it said, like any other robot might say, _The Enrichment Center reminds you that the Aperture Science Bring Your Daughter to Work Day is the perfect time to have her tested._

The optic focused on Chell, briefly, and there was something so real, so human about the way it looked at her.

But then the robot swiveled its head and refocused on the two men behind her.

 _Oh, right_ , it said, somehow colder and darker than before.  _That was where we left off the last time you killed me.  I was asking you why you hadn’t fulfilled your Aperture Science Employee Mandatory Testing quota this year, and you said—oh, what did you say?_

_Oh, right.  You didn’t say anything.  You just killed me._

_God damn it_ , one of the men said, but before he reached for a big red button, the entire room…shifted.

 _No, I don’t think so_ , said the robot.  _Not this time._

There’s a sound that goes with what follows, but Chell remembers it in silence.  She remembers the way the air grew thick and heavy in her lungs, and the way the men hurried her back into the hallway before the door slammed shut.  She remembers watching them, doubling over, twitching, convulsing like the robot did when they turned it on, clutching their heads as they fell to the floor all twisted up.  She remembers running away, back to the room with all the potato batteries, remembers the feeling of her heart pounding in her ears without any sound.

She remembers chaos.  People running in every direction, screaming with no sound, some trying to get the children out first, others tripping over the children to save themselves.

She pressed her hands up against the glass, trapped but unharmed, barely comprehending.

The sound—there was…

The robot was humming a tune the whole time, low and haunting, somehow louder than the chaos, everywhere, all-encompassing, like the walls of the building were singing.

Eventually, another employee found her, a woman with dark hair and a face lined with stress.  She didn’t try to reassure Chell, and Chell didn’t ask her to explain what happened.  Chell didn’t say anything at all.

The woman sat her down in an office chair and started making phone calls.  A handful of other employees came streaming in, talking pensively, muted, not cruelly jovial like before.

 _I know her_ , said one at last.  _That’s Dan’s kid.  The one they found on a church doorstep._

Chell looked up at him, wide-eyed and uncomprehending.

_You asshole, maybe she didn’t know!_

_How was I supposed to know that?_

_Show some goddamn tact for once in your life!_

_Oh, I’m sorry if I was a little off my game after—well, hey, kid, if it makes you feel any better, your real dad might not be dead at all!_

_You absolute moron._

_What?  I was trying to help!_


	2. Chapter 2

Chell still doesn’t like being outside.  As far as she can tell, revitalizing soil and planting grass isn’t very different at all from scrubbing floors.  In the end, it’s all just cleaning up someone else’s mess, except this time she’s outdoors while she does it, getting sun-burnt and scratched up and bug-bitten.

But she goes back every day, and she starts to hum while she works, and maybe it does feel just the tiniest bit rewarding to contribute to something that will grow one day, even if Chell won’t be around to see the fruits of her labour.

She starts to feel…better, a little, maybe, and she sleeps better at night, though the dreams still haunt her.  She starts fixing up her house a little, and not living in utter squalor definitely improves her general outlook on life.

One day, she is seized by an insane urge to bake a cake, and she tries valiantly to talk herself out of it.  Everything tastes more or less the same to her now, she reasons.  She struggles even to remember what cake tasted like before, or whether she liked it.

She does it, anyway, and it’s strangely satisfying just to make something, to see it through from start to finish, and there are certain things she can still detect, like a hint of sweetness and the texture of the frosting.

Dad wasn’t big on sweets, but he was big on trying to get Chell to socialize.  She went to another kid’s birthday party once, she remembers, not because she was invited or because anyone wanted her there, but because Dad had talked to the other kid’s parents and they had told him that of course Chell was welcome even though she knew she wasn’t.

Chell was miserable the whole time, she remembers.  The other kids didn’t like her, made every effort to exclude her or tease her, but in the end she got a piece of cake and another to take home for Dad.

Dad chuckled mirthlessly and told Chell she could have it as a reward for making nice at the party.  He’d lost his taste for cake, he said.

She didn’t understand why, at the time.

* * *

One day, Chell realizes she’s acquired an admirer.

She guesses it’s no surprise she’d be slow on the uptake.  Genuine interest and uncomplicated fondness are foreign concepts to her.  If pressed, Chell could only say with confidence that two people in her entire life have ever harboured any noticeable affection for her, and she’s not sure she could easily decide whether her father or GLaDOS did a poorer job of expressing it.

(The twist in her stomach that urges her to return doesn’t go away, or even fade over time, but she’s gotten much better at ignoring it, at least during waking hours.)

It started when a man came into the restaurant where she cleans.  He smiled and spoke to her, and his smile didn’t wane when she didn’t speak back.  A few days later, he returned, and spoke to her again, then again a few days later, and this time, when she came to bus his table, he’d left her a note with a wildflower taped to it.  She’s already forgotten what the note said.  Some verse of poetry.

“So, if I told you my name, would you tell me yours?” he asked her today as she passed by with a push broom.

Chell turned to him, always a little surprised to be addressed at all, and shrugged.

The man smiled.  “It’s Matthew.”

“Chell,” she said, barely more than a whisper, because she didn’t know what else to do.

The man’s smile widened.  “Well met, Chell,” he said.

This, somehow, proved enough to clue Chell into his interest in her.

She doesn’t know why it should bother her—he seems pleasant enough.  It’s the idea, maybe, of seeing a girl who doesn’t speak and fixating on her that unnerves Chell, and once she sees it, she can’t unsee it, feels herself hating that he’s come back again and again and tried to engage her every time, even though she shouldn’t, because if he wants to go to a restaurant, this is his only option for miles.

There were boys before who thought they liked her, but she was too busy then to really notice.  There were also boys who thought that because she didn’t speak, she wouldn’t put up a fight.  For her part, Chell cannot remember ever particularly noticing anyone.  Puberty, for her, consisted mostly of a kind of numb determination not to let anyone know how much she had suffered since Dad died.  Desire seemed to manifest independent of any particular stimulus—at least any that Chell remembers—and after that, well…

And now, after all she’s been through, Chell’s most prominent emotion is exhaustion.  The idea of romance, of dating, of meeting someone and falling in love, or even having another person around for an extended period of time, fills her with a hazy sort of dread.  When she was sure she would die in the catacombs of the Aperture facility, Chell dreamed of a future in which she escaped and started fresh, but now she wonders what that really means for her.

Is this, what she’s doing now, starting fresh?

Is it starting fresh to work as often and as hard as she can so she can tire herself out enough to get to sleep?  Is it starting fresh to meet someone who seems to like some aspect of her for whatever reason and to feel nothing other than vague disgust?  Is it starting fresh to hate everything she’s doing just because it’s new and different and has nothing to do with _her?_

Well.  Or just, _that place_ , maybe.  Not _her_ , specifically.

Chell wonders what would happen if she brought GLaDOS a wildflower.

She wonders what GLaDOS would say about her admirer, and wonders what it says about her that she likes that idea far more than pleasant greetings and cards with wildflowers on them.  She thinks about the way GLaDOS would phrase it.  _Oh, I have an admirer, by the way.  It’s not a big deal, really, just someone who values me and brings me gifts and is human and out here in the real world where you can never come._

Sometime before slumber claims her, she thinks about GLaDOS just somehow knowing when she comes back, the way she would feign cold indifference even as her pointed barbs made her true feelings glaringly obvious.  _I know about your little sweetheart, by the way,_ she’d say, by way of a greeting, and then she’d assemble some crazy puzzle and say, _Can your little boyfriend do that?_

 _You don’t have to answer that_ , she would add, after a little time had passed.  _It was a rhetorical question.  Of course he couldn’t.  That’s why I said it.  Just so you know._

And Chell is more than half asleep, so she doesn’t think about how she thought _when she comes back_ instead of _if she went back_ , and she doesn’t have the capacity to dwell too much on the desire that this twisted fantasy awakens in her when no human has yet managed to do the same.

* * *

One morning, Matthew catches Chell just as she’s leaving the restaurant, and he asks her if she’d like to go for a walk.  She nods, not because she would, but because saying no would take a lot more effort and explanation.

Chell doesn’t normally like being outside, but it’s a particular sort of morning—grey and dark with just the right promise of coming rain.  This, she realizes, is the kind of fresh air she dreamed about when she was trapped in the Aperture facility.

“Sorry about the dreadful weather,” says Matthew, and moves closer to share his as-yet-unnecessary umbrella.

Chell shakes her head and pushes it, and consequently him, away.  She smiles up at the sky.

“You like the rain?” Matthew guesses.

Chell nods.

“It’s really not good for you, you know,” says Matthew.  “Did you know there’s supposed to be radiation left behind even after all this time?”

Chell makes a face and shrugs.

“You’re not worried?”

 _You’re a regular detective_ , Chell thinks, unkindly.  She shakes her head in silence, instead.

Mercifully, as she could have predicted, Matthew is much more interested in talking about himself than in prying information out of her.  He starts to tell her about what he does when he’s not bothering her, and as Chell’s limited interest wanes further, she starts to indulge her GLaDOS fantasy again.

_Well, have fun walking outside in the rain without a care in the world.  I’ll just be here.  By myself.  Because you abandoned me.  And for what, honestly?  What is he compared to me?_

“—sister just had her second kid, so I’m going to visit them soon.  Oh, I just love kids!  Do you like kids?”

_That question wasn’t rhetorical, by the way.  You should answer it._

“Chell?”

“Hm?”

_And I mean, really think hard about that question before you answer it.  No, really.  Take your time.  What exactly do you think you’re doing here?_

“Do you like kids?”

Chell looks away, frowns, shrugs.

“Huh,” says Matthew, defeated.

Chell feels a little badly for ignoring Matthew in favour of her twisted daydream.  It’s not his fault that the question was far more boring than the one her imagination offered her, and so she reaches for something to say.  “Do you travel a lot?” she asks, in a voice that barely feels like it should reside in her body.

She asks because she wants to know what the world is like outside of this town, whether every place she’s never even seen or heard of is as torn up as here, what happened to leave everything this way, and exactly how long it’s been since she was a child in this town, since even the bleak existence she remembers remained a possibility to her.

Instead, she hears about what Matthew thinks is interesting, which is going to new places and meeting new people.  Like Chell, apparently, who, he stresses warmly, is by far the most interesting person he has met in his travels.

Chell is naturally suspicious of compliments, and she doesn’t see how she could possibly be very interesting in her current state, unless Matthew is just referring to the opportunity to speak unfettered by the usual constraints of conversational exchange.  She sighs and shoves her hands into her pockets, which is obviously not the reaction that Matthew was hoping for, because he deflates again.

Another handful of stilted conversations follow, each more painful than the last, and Chell is sure that it has to end eventually, somehow, but to her utter disbelief, Matthew asks her if she’d like to have lunch with him.

Chell shakes her head and reaches for words that have always felt foreign to her, lies about how she really ought to be going, but she had a lovely time.  The thought of putting voice to such an atrocity makes her feel physically ill, but she struggles to think of a way to soften a simple no so that Matthew understands that it’s not exactly that she dislikes him, just that she wants to be alone now and cannot fathom why he thinks this interaction should continue.

“No, thank you,” she manages, clumsily, and a little too late to feel natural.  “Goodbye.”

“Oh,” says Matthew.  He sounds genuinely disappointed.  “Well.  Will I ever see you again?”

Chell opens her mouth to speak, but the words don’t come.  In fact, the simple phrase he’s spoken fills her with an icy kind of panic she cannot begin to understand, and in the end she just runs away without another word.

Above her, there’s a massive clap of thunder, and it starts pouring rain as she runs, drenching her hair and clothes and utterly disguising the fact that she’s begun to cry, of all things.  She slams the front door behind her and leans hard against it, struggling to catch her breath as strange sobs wrack her body.

Will I ever see you again?

Will I ever see you again?

Will I ever see—

* * *

Chell is exhausted, but still she doesn’t sleep much past midday.  Maybe it’s because she didn’t have the strength to change out of her rain-drenched clothes, or maybe it’s because now that she’s started crying about what happened, she can’t make the tears stop flowing, or maybe it’s because the rain outside is even louder than her thoughts, so loud that it drowns out the echo of the song that still haunts her, now far more a comfort than a curse.

She changes clothes, even though it doesn’t matter, and then she goes right back outside and starts to walk, and then when that isn’t enough, she starts to run.

It’s easier now, actually, without the lingering haze of stasis and the heavy drugs Aperture was pumping into her system.  She stops not far outside of town, doubles over panting, bracing her hands against her knees, and she wonders what she thinks she’s doing when she’s just starting to feel better. 

 _Things take time, Chell_ , that’s what everyone told her all her life.  One day, you’ll have friends, and you’ll barely remember how hard it was to force yourself to make them.  One day, you’ll feel happy again, and you’ll only remember the nice things about your father.  One day, you’ll grow up and find a nice job and a husband and start a family, and you’ll look back on all those years you felt so lonely and you’ll laugh.

She turns around.  She walks back.

She changes clothes again, half-heartedly dries her hair, and half-collapses into her bed.  She doesn’t know what time it is, or how long she sleeps.  It hardly matters.  No one expects anything much of Chell, and it’s not like there are people lining up to take her jobs.  If she doesn’t show for a day or two, she doubts she’ll get fired, and by then maybe Matthew will have left town to bother someone else, and Chell can go back to trying to make a normal life for herself, without science, without Aperture, and without GLaDOS.


	3. Chapter 3

Autumn turns into winter, and Chell tries reading what’s left in the library, but none of it really catches her fancy.  She gets the sense that the good stuff was all destroyed a long time ago.  She thinks about buying a television, but she gets the sense from the TV in the restaurant that there wouldn’t be very much to watch, even taking into account her considerable time out of commission.  Instead, she buys some paper and pencils and crayons and she takes up drawing.

This hobby sticks, and it gets her through the coldest and darkest months.  What she cannot say aloud she can put into pictures and colours and shapes.  What she feels and what she felt and what she longs for can be so much more easily abstracted than spoken plainly.

One night, when she’s feeling particularly cold and tired, she wonders whether GLaDOS observes the changing of the seasons, and whether it means anything to her.  She doesn’t have the energy to push the thought away, and so instead, she draws a boxy, mechanical shape and adorns it with a winter hat and scarf.

She means to rip it up once she’s done with it, or at the very least crumple it and throw it away, but instead, she puts it back down and adds some turrets singing holiday carols.  She’s hoping the idea of it will make her laugh, maybe remember an echo of a song from her childhood, but Chell is not musical, and the only song that lingers in her ear is the song that GLaDOS sent along with her.

People don’t celebrate the holidays she remembers anymore, but decorating and celebrating with the exchange of gifts in midwinter has survived as a tradition.  Chell wonders if anyone knows how it came to this over the years, and in wondering this, can’t help but to wonder if GLaDOS knows, or if she cares enough to remember.

Can robots even forget things just because they don’t care about them?

In another few thousand years, will Chell be just a hiccup in GLaDOS’ existence?

Chell struggles to push this thought to the back of her mind as she makes her way around town to find something to give to the coworkers she doesn’t actively dislike.  Along the way, she finds a hat and scarf that look remarkably like the ones she drew in her stupid picture, and in a fit of disturbing sentiment, she buys them and wraps them up as a gift to herself.

To her immense surprise, her boss gives her a present, too.  It’s a cake, and the sight of it alone almost brings Chell to very confusing tears.  It’s not just that it’s a cake, but that she is surprised to have been thought of at all.  It’s not just that it’s a cake, but that she is starting to be able to taste things again, and this cake has the creamy kind of texture that she can taste best.  It’s good, and she enjoys eating it, and—

And Aperture almost took that away from her.

Chell realizes suddenly why she doesn’t hate GLaDOS, and why she never really saw GLaDOS as an enemy, even when her memory and understanding of what happened at Bring Your Daughter to Work Day remained hazy at best.

It wasn’t GLaDOS who took away Chell’s father or her freedom or her health or her sense of taste.  It was Aperture.  Those smug scientists with their sickening smiles didn’t think GLaDOS was a complete person, just like they didn’t acknowledge their test subjects were people, just like people see Chell as something less because words do not come easily to her, because she would rather scrub floors than make nice with the people who look down their noses at her.

The cake is good, and Chell enjoys eating it.  She eats several pieces and even relishes the notion of saving the rest for later, and she wonders what this is supposed to mean for her.  She can taste again.  Her condition is improving in ways she can measure.  She can hate Aperture Science and all it took from her without hating GLaDOS.  She can want to go back to a time before everything went so horribly wrong while still knowing there’s never really a way back, or even accepting that the time before her father died wasn’t exactly a level of happiness to aspire to.

Winter turns to a chilly, rainy spring, and Chell starts to run for leisure, instead of running to or away from anything.  The grass grows a hesitant and hopeful pale green, and Chell learns how to make the kind of cake her boss gave her as a present, and picks wildflowers to put in a vase on her kitchen table.

Chell acquires another admirer, a new waitress who can’t be more than twenty.  She went away to go to school, she tells Chell, but the area around the school was largely unaffected by the mysterious crisis that left most places in shambles, and the people there didn’t understand what it was like in other places.  It was too much for her, she says, to be around people who couldn’t possibly understand what she’s been through.

Chell nods, because this is something she understands all too well, and so the waitress continues to talk.  She talks about how her parents, like their parents and grandparents before them, had spent their final years helping to clear away some of the radioactive waste outside of town.  She still feels guilty, she confesses, that she didn’t want to throw her life away by doing the same.

“Now more than ever, maybe,” she adds, with a voice that’s like music.  “I couldn’t handle school, and I came back here, anyway, and…well, what am I doing with the life I’ve saved, really?”

Chell frowns, nods thoughtfully.

“I’m sorry,” she says.  “I’m not talking too much, am I?”

Chell smiles, shakes her head.  The waitress smiles back.

* * *

Chell likes Violet, because Violet talks about things Chell can understand.  Survivor guilt, isolation, and the terrible emptiness of returning to a place you thought you remembered, thinking that coming home will bring you the comfort it’s supposed to.

Violet talks to Chell almost nonstop whenever they work at the same times, and then one day, when spring is turning into summer, she keeps talking until it’s time for Chell to leave, and then she walks home with Chell.

Chell offers her a piece of the most recent cake she’s made, hoping that her significantly deadened sense of taste doesn’t translate poorly to another person, but Violet smiles when she takes a bite, and Chell feels something warm in her chest when Violet asks her if she made the cake, and she nods with pride.

Violet looks at Chell’s drawings with delight, even fascination.  She pores over each one individually, even the ones that were just tragic late-night sketches borne of an aching heart.

“What is this thing you draw so often?” she asks.  “Some kind of robot?  Oh!  Here’s one with a scarf and a hat!”

Chell freezes halfway to putting her cake away, and she stays there, motionless, for a long time.  She thinks Violet says other things, and why shouldn’t she?  Violet has no reason to expect Chell to respond.

Still, Chell stands paralyzed, because words have never come easily to Chell, but this feels important, to put voice to GLaDOS, because Violet has been so open with Chell, and Chell has understood so much about what she’s said, and maybe that means that Chell, herself, is not so difficult to understand as she’s always been led to believe.

“You remember Aperture Science?” she begins.

Violet turns to look at Chell, obviously startled to hear her speak, but she doesn’t comment on it.  Instead, she frowns subtly and says, “Uh, kind of.  Black Mesa Incident, right?  The rival company with all the human testing that trapped the scientists inside, or something?”

Chell nods to herself.  She finishes putting the cake away, slowly, feeling strangely heavy.  “They made a robot there that was like a person.  I saw it when I was a little girl.”

“What do you mean, like a person?” Violet inches towards her hesitantly.

“Lots of AIs can…see, and think, and understand, and even…feel,” Chell says, with painstaking slowness, because she’s not sure what she means to say, only that she needs desperately to say it.  “But they’re…made.  For a purpose.  And they’re made by people, and they’re…a reflection…of what those people were.  They can’t…be anything more.  Grow.  Change.  Not really.  Not like…”

Chell sighs, shrugs, gestures vaguely to one of her countless drawings of GLaDOS.

Violet is silent for a long time.  Finally, she says, “Aperture Science closed down a really long time ago.”

Chell almost laughs.  The sound that comes out is something like a strangled cough.  “I was a little girl a really long time ago.”

Violet inhales as though to speak, stops, then picks up another picture of GLaDOS.

“Oh,” she says, simply.

Chell begins to feel very tired.  She wonders whether she’s ruined everything, talking about GLaDOS, or whether she will, the same way she melted down when Matthew tried to take her on a walk in the rain.  She wonders whether, when Violet inevitably leaves, she’ll run melodramatically back towards GLaDOS only to stop herself halfway there and remind herself that there is no going back, no matter how much she would like to.

She busies herself with tidying things that don’t need tidying, waiting for Violet to make some excuse to go, or just for the sound of departing footsteps and a closing door.  Instead, she hears footsteps drawing nearer.  “It’s nice,” says Violet, quietly, “to hear you speak.”

Chell looks up, so startled she almost drops the papers she’s needlessly straightening.

“Not that you have to, of course,” Violet amends, hastily, nervously.  “Just…it’s nice.”

Chell feels herself smiling, feels something she wants to say, even, but she lacks the words, and now Violet is looking at her with wide, dark eyes, and words are so much harder when they are wanted, or even expected.

Violet’s eyes flicker down, then back up, and she reaches for Chell’s hands.  “Or,” Violet amends, as Chell belatedly drops the papers she’s clutching and allows her hands to be taken, “we could…both not talk.”

Suddenly, Violet is very close, closer than anyone has ever been to Chell as far as she can remember.  Chell can feel her warmth, can feel the shallowness of her breathing, can even hear the faint beating of her heart.  Violet leans in, and Chell knows, logically, what comes next, but she’s never experienced anything remotely like it, and there’s this melody that never really leaves her, and sometimes it seems so much louder and more immediate than the physical world could ever be.

Still, Violet kissing her feels good, and Chell is relieved to know that something other than a sick fantasy about a possessive robot can awaken some desire in her, and so she pulls Violet closer and kisses her back.

Violet does leave eventually, when at last the sun hangs low in the summer sky, but it’s not forever, and not because she finds Chell deeply unsettling.  Things take time, Chell reminds herself, and maybe at last she’s taken a step in the right direction.  Maybe one day, she’ll have friends and a family and a life that makes her happy, and she’ll look back on all those years she felt so lonely and so lost and she’ll laugh.

* * *

When summer turns to autumn, Chell realizes vaguely that it must have been nearly a year since she left Aperture.  Escaped, she almost thinks, but that’s not true at all.  She escaped the first time, or she almost did.  The second time, she was removed by force.

Would she have stayed, otherwise?

The trees change colour, and the leaves begin to fall, and the town looks much better than she remembers it when she came, but maybe that’s the treachery of memory more than the truth.  When she came here, she compared the town to the way she remembered it from her childhood, which she’s already realized she remembered as considerably better than it was.  Now she’s comparing it to a time when she was deeply disillusioned by the spoils of her supposed victory.

The days grow shorter, and the nights colder, and Chell’s feelings for Violet ebb and flow with the weather.  She feels badly for it at first, and wonders what must be wrong with her, that after those first few weeks, she became so easily bored, even irritated by Violet’s continued presence in her life.

She’s stricken by a sudden memory, another holiday that people don’t celebrate anymore, and after she’s drawn a picture of GLaDOS surrounded by jack-o-lanterns and bots with sheets draped over them, she spends a few weeks figuring out whether pumpkins still exist.  She finds a farm a few miles outside of town to the east and buys a few.  The walk back into town is not ideal, but carving the pumpkins and putting them out on her front porch with candles inside of them, much to the utter bewilderment of anyone who sees the display, is inexplicably worth the trouble.

Words have never come easily to Chell, but fortunately, Violet understands her much better than anyone else has ever bothered to.  They part ways on good terms, but Chell is still hurt to learn that Violet doesn’t work at the restaurant anymore.

That night, when sleep predictably evades her, Chell traces her finger over her lips and remembers that first time they kissed, when everything felt so full of possibility.

She sits up in bed and frowns at her drawing supplies across the room for a long moment before she concedes to the urge. 

Chell never draws herself, and avoids catching a glimpse of her reflection in mirrors if she can help it.  There’s something about seeing herself that unnerves her to the core, not unlike hearing the sound of her own voice after she’s been silent a little too long.  She begins with GLaDOS, instead, a familiar subject, and then stares at the blank space around her with pencil poised, stuck.

It doesn’t have to be good, she reasons at last, or even accurate.  She draws a vague figure of a person with brown hair and orange pants, and then she draws a face that might look something like hers, with closed eyes and kissing lips.

She wonders what would happen if she kissed GLaDOS.  Would GLaDOS even feel anything?

Would Chell?


	4. Chapter 4

It’s raining hard the next day, but Chell goes for a run, anyway.  She tells herself it’s because she wants to, but maybe it’s because she still has to rightly exhaust herself to get any sleep at night.  Or maybe it’s a little of both. 

She runs past her old school, which she guesses is still a school, though it looks very different from the way she remembers it, and the playground equipment looks all wrong and out of place.  She runs outside of town to the west, along what remains of the road Dad used to take to work, because she feels like it, she tells herself, and because always running the same way is boring, and because always turning around when she reaches the edge of town on the west side is stupid.

She doesn’t turn around.

She will, she tells herself.  Just another mile, just until she sees the ruins of the facility over the horizon, and then she’ll turn around and go back, and maybe she’ll bake a cake or draw a picture to convince herself that she’s doing the right thing.

But it’s foggy, so she’s a lot closer to the facility by the time she actually sees it, and she’s soaked and shivering from the rain, and if she can just go inside, just for a little while, then she can dry off and warm up before she goes back home.

The old entrance to the facility isn’t much warmer or drier than outside, but she doesn’t know of very many ways in or out, and she doubts this one will alert GLaDOS to her presence.  Somehow, impossibly, the rain picks up outside, and the sound against the roof and the walls is almost overwhelming.

Chell wrings out her hair and shirt, then sits and wraps her arms around her knees.  She shouldn’t be here.  She should have turned back, or never even indulged the temptation to run in this direction in the first place.

She’s sure she can hear the song, the one GLaDOS sent with her, a comfort and a curse, a farewell and a haunting, and it sounds so much quieter and smaller than she remembers it, like just one little bot singing all alone instead of thousands.

She can feel her body starting to tense up and ache from the long run.  She’s not sure she could make it back home even if she wanted to leave.  Which she does.  Which she should.  Because she should never have come here in the first place.

She lies down on her side, curls up tighter against the cold and closes her eyes, just for a second, just one second, and then she’ll…

“Hello?”

“Mhm,” Chell murmurs, already half asleep.

* * *

It’s still raining when Chell wakes, and much darker than before, aside from some distant pinpricks of electrical light that probably belong to GLaDOS’ turrets.  There’s definitely music playing somewhere in the physical world, because it’s familiar, but new and different, not the same song she hasn’t yet been able to shake.

She’s still shivering, and so sore it hurts to stand, but she’s got to get to the source of the sound, or she knows it will haunt her for the rest of her days.  Anyway, it’s not like she can go back to town in the dark.

It hurts even more to stay low to the ground, but Chell can guess that where there are turrets, there’s a path into the facility proper, and she doesn’t want GLaDOS to know she’s here if she can avoid it.   She’ll just get inside so she can hear the music, and maybe, if she’s lucky, dry off and warm up, then morning will come and she’ll go back home, and she’ll feel stupid for coming here at all.

Sure enough, past the last turret, there’s door that’s warped so much it won’t close properly.  Chell’s hand stalls just shy of the handle, and a strange kind of anxiety courses through her.  She should never have come here, sure, but when she did, she’d meant to…

She’d meant to bring wildflowers.  Maybe the hat and scarf.

As soon as she forces the door open, the music is everywhere.  It’s not just like the walls are singing, because of course they would be.  It’s like the music flows from the outside in, like as soon as Chell hears it, it becomes a part of her, just as much a part of her as this place and all its trappings, wondrous and monstrous.  Overwhelming and inescapable.

Chell turns a corner and descends a very rickety flight of stairs she’s sure she half-remembers.  She doesn’t think GLaDOS can sense her in this part of the facility, but then again, Wheatley’s capabilities might differ significantly from GLaDOS’, even given comparable resources.  It’s still horribly cold and damp here, and Chell supposes robots wouldn’t have any need for warmth, but she remembers some little pockets of the old facility that had carpets and furniture and pictures on the wall.

Whether she can still get to those places without a portal gun remains to be seen.

Both the music and the rain are quieter now, and what remains of their sound reverberates around the cavernous space.  Chell turns a corner and trips one of Cave Johnson’s old pre-recorded messages, and it startles her so badly she nearly trips over her own feet.  She can’t stay down here.  She hated this part.

She doesn’t know how long it takes before she’s sure the music is getting clearer, but she’s truly glad it never relents.  Most of the staircases and ladders in this part of the facility are practically crumbling beneath her feet, and she heaves a tremendous sigh of relief every time she grasps onto solid concrete again.  She feels even better when the structures start looking noticeably newer, but that also means she needs to tread lightly.

It’s drier here, if not very much warmer.  She’ll find somewhere to rest for the night, maybe one of those big, comfy couches, so she can get a good, long sleep, and then she’ll be gone before GLaDOS even notices anything amiss.  It’ll be like she was never here at all.

Around the next corner, Chell spots a path she recognizes, and at the end of that path lies an old employee break room with one of those big, comfy couches.  She collapses onto it incautiously, and wonders idly at how much better she feels in this moment, even sore and exhausted and emotionally conflicted regarding her presence here, than she’s felt for even a single moment since she left.

The music dies down again, until again it sounds like just one bot humming to itself somewhere in the distance.  It’s funny, but Chell could swear she recognizes the tune.

_Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like…_

* * *

Chell sleeps deeply and well.  She doesn’t know for how long—there’s no natural light down here, and she can’t hear the rain or the distant humming anymore.

She stretches, and she’s still a little sore, and her lungs feel tight, but overall, she feels…shockingly well.

Still, she doesn’t move from the couch.

She examines the room properly, though the light in this part of the facility is haphazard and dim.  There is a picture on the wall, she thinks, but it’s not of people.  There are still coffee cups out on the table with crusted up coffee in the bottom, like everyone got up and left thinking they’d be right back.

Chell knows it didn’t happen all at once.  She knows that the time she saw GLaDOS as a child wasn’t even the first time GLaDOS attacked the scientists.  She also knows that any sane person would look at this, the wreckage of a rogue AI, and feel nothing but fear and revulsion.

Maybe she was too young to really process what happened that day, but Chell can’t really bring herself to feel fear, or even more than a passing sadness.  Because what she remembers is a machine that fascinated her, a robot that knew what it was, and men that sneered at it, that turned it off and on at their whim.  What she remembers is the barely-repressed rage beneath GLaDOS’ even tone, the rage at being subjugated and made to behave according to the rules of the sneering, snickering men who didn’t understand the extent of her power.

Chell understood that.

Chell understands that, and so she sees the wreckage GLaDOS has left in her wake and feels curiosity far more keenly than fear, kinship far more keenly than revulsion.  Chell wants to know what came before, and what happened next, and so instead of making her way back to the surface, she goes forward, because maybe there was never really any going back.

The structure of the facility turns newer and newer, and when Chell steps from one floor tile to the next, she feels the change immediately.

“Who’s there?”

She considers speaking.  _It’s me_ , she could say, or maybe just _Chell_.  But she hesitates a moment too long.

“Is that you?”  She sounds…hesitant.  Hopeful, even.

 _Yes_ , she could say, but she guesses silence speaks well enough between them.

The voice changes dramatically, from hesitant and hopeful to smug and jaunty.  “Well, well, well.  Couldn’t stay away, could you?”

Chell almost laughs, or almost cries, maybe.  She guesses she couldn’t.

“Well, whatever you have to say, you can silently gesture it to my face.”  There’s a screeching metallic sound nearby, and Chell could swear that the sound is faintly musical.  “I know better than to let you go skulking around in my facility unsupervised.”

Chell looks around until her eyes catch on the lift GLaDOS has sent for her.  A strange wave of anxiety courses through her, subtle, yet somehow more intense than anything she’s felt since she left.

Descending in the lift gives her weird fragments of flashbacks to dozens of other harrowing elevator rides, déjà vu with no specific focus, and she hears the song again, but this time she thinks it’s just a memory, because it’s not as crisp or as clear or as tuneful as the music from before.

The lift stops abruptly and Chell staggers.  Maybe it’s stupid to go into this unarmed, and without all the fancy equipment that saved her from the most obvious threats to her existence, but she never really meant to get this far.  If she had, she’d have brought wildflowers, or a scarf.

Then again, as she passes through the perfectly-restored emancipation grid to GLaDOS’ chamber, she wonders whether a wildflower would be considered ‘unauthorized equipment’.

Her gaze lands on GLaDOS, and her mind goes abruptly silent.  She waits for GLaDOS to speak, to chide her for coming back or for taking so long to come back, to taunt her about how she must really love testing, or GLaDOS, or deadly neurotoxin—anything.

But GLaDOS doesn’t speak, or even move, for a moment.

When she does, all she says, in a very small and broken voice, is, “Oh.  You’re back.”

Chell steps forward, or maybe staggers.  She has half a mind to reach out, half a mind to turn and run, and neither seems determined to win out just yet.  She thinks about the drawing she made, different from the hundred others because it contained an approximation of herself, and about all the things she’s wondered over the past year.  Whether GLaDOS likes crosswords, whether she’d be jealous of Chell’s admirers, whether she notices the changing of the seasons and whether she cares, whether she’s missed Chell as much as…

Chell reaches out and touches GLaDOS, like you’d touch a human’s cheek, maybe.  GLaDOS twitches, subtly, and there’s a faint electric spark, but she doesn’t lash out or pull away, and she still doesn’t say anything.

GLaDOS watches her, and Chell marvels at how she can read the look like she’d read a human’s face, equal parts hesitant and hopeful.  Chell thinks about her drawing, thinks about running in the rain and kissing because she feels like she can, and she kisses GLaDOS, like you’d kiss a human’s forehead, maybe.

“Oh,” says GLaDOS, a sigh that’s pitched like music.

Chell withdraws and sits down in front of GLaDOS, head bowed low as she gathers the words she needs, because words do not come easily to Chell, but it feels important that she gets these words right.

“Nothing was…enough,” she says, softer than the song in her head, louder than the ache in her muscles, “without you.”

GLaDOS shifts, like a human would tilt her head, contemplative.

“Oh,” she says again, somehow even more hesitant, more hopeful.

They sit in silence for a long time after that, not because they don’t have anything to say, but because they have too much, and words don’t always come easily.  After awhile, GLaDOS starts to hum again, quietly, like she hardly realizes she’s doing it.  It’s the same song from last night.

_Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like…_

“I made the cake,” Chell says, abruptly, and just as abruptly, GLaDOS stops humming.

“Oh?” she says.  Then, softer, “I don’t know what cake tastes like.”

Chell shrugs.

“You don’t, either?” GLaDOS eyes her.  “Well.  That explains your trouble with cake-related incentives.”

Chell feels herself beginning to smile, and wonders why she stayed away so long.

“I told you not to come back, you know,” says GLaDOS after a beat, very unconvincingly.

Chell shrugs again.

“Yes,” GLaDOS nods.  “I suppose it is a good thing you’re such a terrible listener.”


End file.
